Was he sincere?

The true representative of the better principles of the Independents was Henry Vane; their acknowledged leader was Oliver Cromwell. Was he sincere? It is difficult to disbelieve that he was imbued with the principles of Puritan reforms, and may have always thought himself faithful to the interest of England; as in his foreign policy he most certainly was. All great men incline to fatalism, for their success is a mystery to themselves; and it was not entirely with hypocrisy that Cromwell professed himself the servant of Providence, borne along by irresistible necessity.

Had peace never been broken, the Independents would have remained a powerless minority; the civil war gave them a rallying point in the army. In the season of great public excitement, fanatics crowded to the camp; an ardor for popular liberty mingled with the fervors of religious excitement. Cromwell had early perceived that the pride and valor of the cavaliers could never be overthrown by ordinary hirelings; he therefore sought to fill the ranks of his army with enthusiasts. His officers were alike ready to preach and pray, and to take the lead in the field of battle. With much hypocrisy, his camp was the scene of much real piety; and long afterward, when his army was disbanded, its members, who for the most part were farmers and yeomen and their sons, resumed their places in the industrious classes, while the soldiers of the royalists were often found among vagabonds and beggars. It was the troops of Cromwell that first, in the open field, broke the ranks of the royal squadrons; and the decisive victory of Marston Moor was won by their iron energy and valor.

The final overthrow of the prospects of Charles in the field, in 1647, marks the crisis of the struggle for the ascendent between the Presbyterians and Independents. The former had their organ in the parliament, the latter in the army, in which the Presbyterian commander had been surprised into a resignation by the self-denying ordinance and the intrigues of Cromwell. As the duration of the parliament depended on its own will, the army refused to be disbanded, claiming to represent the interests of the people, and actually constituting the only balance to the otherwise unlimited power of the parliament. The army could call the parliament a usurper,

and the parliament could arraign the army as a branch of the public service, whose duty was obedience, and not counsel. On the other hand, if the parliament pleaded its office as the grand council of the nation, the army could urge its merits as the active and successful antagonist to royal despotism.

The Presbyterians broke forth into menaces against the army. "These men," whispered Cromwell to Ludlow, "will never leave till the army pull them out by the ears." The Presbyterian majority appeared to possess paramount power, and did not possess it. Could they gain the person of the king, and succeed in pacific negotiations, their influence would be renewed by the natural love of order in the minds of the English people. A conflict with the Independents was unavoidable; for the Independents could in no event negotiate with the king. In every negotiation, a free parliament must have been a condition; and a free parliament would have been their doom. Self-preservation, uniting with ambition and wild enthusiasm, urged them to uncompromising hostility with Charles I. He or they must perish. "If my head or the king's must fall," argued Cromwell, "can I hesitate which to choose?" By an act of violence the Independents seized on the king, and held him in their special custody. "Now," said the exulting Cromwell, "now that I have the king in my hands, I have the parliament in my pocket."

At length the Presbyterian majority, sustained by the eloquence of Prynne, attempted to dispense with the army, and, by a decided vote, resolved to make peace with the king. To save its party from an entire defeat, in December, 1648, the army interposed, and "purged " the house of commons. "Hear us," said the excluded members to Colonel Pride, who expelled them. "I cannot spare the time,” replied the soldier. "By what right are we arrested?" demanded they of the extravagant Hugh Peter. "By the right of the sword," answered the late envoy from Massachusetts. "You are called," said he, as he preached to the decimated parliament, "to lead the people out of Egyptian bondage; this army must root up monarchy, not only here, but in France and other kingdoms round about." Cromwell, the night after "the interruption," reiterated: "I knew nothing of these late pro

ceedings; but, since the work has been done, I am glad of it and will endeavor to maintain it."

When the winnowing of the house of commons was finished, there remained few beside republicans; and it was resolved to bring the unhappy monarch to trial before a special commission. "Providence and necessity," said Cromwell, affecting indecision, "have cast the house upon this deliberation. I shall pray God to bless our counsels." The young and sincere Algernon Sidney opposed, and saw the danger of a counter-revolution. "No one will stir," cried Cromwell impatiently: "I tell you, we will cut off his head with the crown on it." Sidney withdrew; and Charles was abandoned to the sanguinary severity of a sect. To sign the death-warrant was a solemn deed, from which some of his judges were inclined to shrink; Cromwell concealed the magnitude of the act under an air of buffoonery; the chamber rung with gayety; he daubed the cheek of one of the judges that sat next him with ink, and, amidst shouts of laughter, compelled another, the wavering Ingoldsby, to sign the paper as a jest. The ambassadors of foreign princes presented no remonstrance; and, when the admirable collections of the unhappy king were sold at auction, they purchased his favorite works of art with rival eagerness. Holland alone negotiated. The English people were overawed.

Treason against the state, on the part of its highest officers, is the darkest of human offences. Fidelity to the constitution is due from every citizen; in a monarch, the debt is enhanced, for the monarch is the hereditary and special favorite of the fundamental laws. The murderer, even where his victim is eminent for mind and character, destroys what time will repair; and, deep as is his guilt, society suffers but transiently from the transgression. But the king who conspires against the liberties of the people conspires to subvert the most precious bequest of past ages, the dearest hope of future time; he would destroy genius in its birth and enterprise in its sources, and sacrifice the prolific causes of intelligence and virtue to his avarice or his vanity, his caprices or his ambition; would rob the nation of its nationality, the individual of the prerogatives of man; would deprive common

life of its sweets, by depriving it of its security, and religion of its power to solace, by subjecting it to supervision and control. His crime would not only enslave a present race of men, but forge chains for unborn generations. There can be no fouler deed.

Tried by the standard of his own intentions and his own actions, Charles I., it may be, had little right to complain. Yet, when history gives its impartial verdict on the execution, it remembers that the king was delivered, by a decimated parliament, which had prejudged his case, to a commission composed of his bitterest enemies, and erected in defiance of the wishes of the people. His judges were but a military tribunal; and the judgment, which assumed to be a solemn exercise of justice on the worst of criminals, arraigned by a great nation and tried by its representatives, was, in truth, an act of tyranny. His accusers could have rightfully proceeded only as the agents of the popular sovereignty; and the people disclaimed the deed. An appeal to them would have reversed the decision. The churchmen, the Presbyterians, the lawyers, the opulent landholders, the merchants, and the great majority of the English nation, preferred the continuance of a limited monarchy. There could be no republic. Not sufficient advancement had been made in political knowledge. Milton believed himself a friend of popular liberty; and defended the revocable nature of all conceded civil power; yet his scheme of government, which proposed to subject England to the executive authority of a selfperpetuating council, is ruinous to equal freedom. Not one of the proposed methods of government was practicable.

If the execution of Charles, on the thirtieth of January, 1649, be considered by the rule of utility, its effects will be found to have been entirely bad. A free parliament would have saved the king, and reformed church and state; in aiming at the immediate enjoyment of democratic liberty, the Independents of that day delayed popular enfranchisements. Nations change their institutions but slowly: to attempt to pass abruptly from feudalism and monarchy to democratic equality was the thought of enthusiasts, who understood neither the history, the character, nor the condition of the

country. It was like laying out into new streets a city already crowded with massive structures. The death of the king was the policy of Cromwell, and not the policy of the nation.

The remaining members of the commons were now by their own act constituted the sole legislature and sovereign of England. The peerage was abolished with monarchy; the connection between state and church rent asunder; but there was no republic. Selfish ambition forbade it; the state of society and the distribution and tenure of property forbade it. The commons usurped not only all powers of ordinary legislation, but even the right of remoulding the constitution. They were a sort of collective, self-constituted, perpetual dictatorship. Like Rome under its decemviri, England was enslaved by its legislators; English liberty had become the patrimony and estate of the commons; the forms of government, the courts of justice, peace and war, all executive, all legislative power, rested with them. They were irresponsible, absolute, and apparently never to be dissolved but at their own pleasure.

But the commons were not sustained by public opinion. They were resisted by the royalists and the Catholics, by the Presbyterians and the fanatics, by the honest republicans and the army. In Ireland, the Catholics dreaded from them the worst cruelties that Protestant bigotry could inflict. Scotland, almost unanimous in its adhesion to Presbyterianism, regarded with horror the rise of democracy and the triumph of the Independents; the fall of the Stuarts foreboded the overthrow of its independence; it loved liberty, but it loved its nationality. It feared the sovereignty of an English parliament, and desired the restoration of monarchy as a guarantee against the danger of being treated as a conquered province. In England, the opulent landholders, who swayed their ignorant dependants, rendered popular institutions impossible; and too little intelligence had as yet been diffused through the mass of the people to make them capable of taking the lead in the progress of civilization. The schemes of social and civil equality found no support but in the enthusiasm of the few who fostered them; and clouds of discontent gathered sullenly over the nation.

The attempt at a counter-revolution followed. But the